Baked Plantain Chips and Guacamole

Lately I feel like the days are flying by. Between school and after school activities, it’s dinner time before I know it. Even though the days go fast, I can see that my kids’ appetites are growing. They need more nutritious food after school to help fuel them through their after school activities.

As much as I appreciate the ease of handing them some chopped fruit with a gluten free granola bar or pretzels, I have been seeing that it’s not enough. By seeing, I mean them insisting over and over again that they’re still hungry. So, I’ve been thinking of ways to overcome this and give them a truly satisfying snack.

We do meal planning on Sundays before we do a big grocery trip, and this time I wrote out a list of snacks ideas too. The first on the list was baked plantain chips and guacamole. We have plantain chips from the store from time to time and my kids have always liked them, but they’re expensive and a little too salty in my opinion. That said, I figured that since they like the taste and texture of plantain chips and my daughter loves avocado that it could work.

Happily, they came out great and they were so simple to make!! It took 18 minutes in the oven and a couple of minutes to prepare so I did it before I picked them up at school and it was a breeze. The trickiest part is peeling the plantain itself, so I recommend cutting off one edge and then using a knife to slice down the side of the peel so that you can remove it more easily. It will be difficult to peel it with your hands alone.

Now, when it comes to the guacamole, I have to mention again that we love the natural flavor of avocado so much that we don’t like adding to many things into it. So our 3-ingredient avocado dip or guacamole, whichever you prefer to call it enhances the avocado flavor. You’ll notice that I use a Red Hawaiian Salt. That’s on purpose because we find that just a little bit brings out the flavor better than any other kind of salt we’ve tried, but if you don’t have any you can use your favorite coarse salt. I just don’t recommend using a regular table salt.